Tag Archives: regulation

Gerrymandering, Politics, and Race

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The (eight Justice) Supreme Court is going to take up the question of gerrymandering and Congressional districts in Virginia and North Carolina.  In fact, the case the Court is hearing is narrower than that:

drawing legislative districts based on race.

Never mind that the Democrats’ Voting Rights Act of 1965 mandates race-based districting: the VRA

generally prohibits reducing minority-voting power through redistricting[]

which, of course, explicitly requires race-based districting in order to “protect” that “power.”

Indeed, the whole divide[] between white and minority voters nonsense with which Jess Bravin opened his piece at the link is just a tacit summary of the Left’s racism.  We’re all Americans.  Full stop.  Any “divide” is nothing but an artificiality, fueled by the Left’s fundamental identity policies that end up masking real abuses.

Were the Left, and now the courts, serious about how bad gerrymandering is, they’d agree to its elimination altogether.  Congressional districts should be squares enclosing substantially equal sized populations, differing from those straight-line boundaries only at the borders between states, and drawn without regard to the Left’s identity politics concerning which special groups of Americans are resident in which districts.

Four Pillars of a Health Care System?

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The Wall Street Journal posited this in a Wednesday op-ed.

1. Provide a path to catastrophic health insurance for all Americans.

The WSJ then supports this with old saws: being covered generally leads to better medical results, health insurance is good for the wallet, and so on.  Then they want a government solution—while they carefully avoid saying how they would pay for it:

The ObamaCare replacement should make it possible for all people to get health insurance that provides coverage for basic prevention, like vaccines, and expensive medical care that exceeds, perhaps, $5,000 for individuals.

Those Americans who don’t get health insurance through employers, or Medicare and Medicaid, should be eligible for a refundable tax credit….

They don’t even say why catastrophic health insurance should be particularly targeted by Government.  They ignore an actual market solution for this: free market competition, accompanied with lower tax rates (which leave more money in people’s pockets), and no annual or income caps or requirements for high deductible insurance plans (and no requirement for any insurance plan at all) on Health Savings Accounts.  Folks are fully capable of making their own decisions about the structure of their health insurance plans without the Know Betters of Government holding them by the hand.  And insurance companies, in a fully competitive environment, are fully capable of developing and delivering the products actual customers want without Government mandates.  If that includes catastrophic insurance plans, those will appear.

2. Accommodate people with pre-existing health conditions.

See above regarding free markets.  Of course such coverage would come at a higher cost than other sorts of health coverages; the risk being transferred to the insurer is higher.  But even this risk is not certain.  Folks who’ve had a heart attack (or more than one), for instance, have a preexisting condition (unless a single heart attack has occurred sufficiently far in the past that a medical doctor (the patient’s, not the insurer’s or a Government hireling) says it’s a one-off and not preexisting), but not everyone who’s had heart attacks will have their next one simultaneously.  Even a preexisting condition can be amortized across time given a free market that allows pooling of [those who’ve had heart attacks] so that premiums can be adjusted to match the actual payout requirements, the actual risk—just like “ordinary” insurance plans.

So as long as someone remains insured, he should be allowed to move from employer coverage to the individual market without facing exclusions or higher premiums based on his health status.

This conflates two separate questions.  The preexisting question is addressed just above.  The mobility of an insuree (or someone who’d like to buy a health insurance plan) is separate: and yes, in a free market environment, an insuree would be able to take the plan he’s purchased, whether originally obtained through his employer (unless it was the employer who actually did the purchase and the premium payments) or bought on the individual market, with him wherever he went or to whatever job he moved.  The latter case, too, would reduce or eliminate the need for the new employer to offer health insurance coverage through his benefits program.

3. Allow broad access to health-savings accounts.

There should be a one-time federal tax credit to encourage all Americans to open an HSA and begin using it to pay for routine medical bills. And HSAs combined with high-deductible insurance should be incorporated directly into the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Another Government solution—again carefully unpaid for—and it’s much too timid.  I addressed HSAs and their market availability above.

4. Deregulate the market for medical services.

This is the only move necessary.  It’s the move to enable the free market solution.

Full stop.

There’s Speculation and There’s Speculation

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Kansas has a law that requires voters to prove they’re citizens—and so eligible to vote—before they’re allowed actually to vote.  A Federal trial judge issued an injunction barring enforcement of the law, and the 10th Circuit Appeals Court upheld the injunction.

After Kansas had shown that in a single county,

eleven noncitizens successfully registered to vote; and after it went into effect another fourteen were prevented from registering. These 25 cases are just the tip of the iceberg in Sedgwick County[,]

Judge Jerome Holmes, for the 10th Circuit, wrote

[W]e reject as based on conjecture Secretary Kobach’s invitation to consider as “just the tip of the iceberg” the twenty-five cases in Sedgwick County of aliens registering or attempting to register. The assertion that the “number of aliens on the voter rolls is likely to be in the hundreds, if not thousands” is pure speculation….

On the other side of the equation is the near certainty that without the preliminary injunction over 18,000 US citizens in Kansas will be disenfranchised for purposes of the 2016 federal elections….

Never mind that Holmes’ near certainty is pure speculation.  (I won’t go into the fact that folks wishing to vote in an election being run by a State also must be citizens of that State in order to be eligible to vote, not merely mythically generalized “US citizens”—a fact the 10th Circuit should be embarrassed that Holmes appears not to know.)

The Courts Get Another One Right

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This case involves how much Federal control over land deeded by the Feds to a State the Feds retain when they make the deed.  In the particular case, the Feds, ‘way back in 1949, deeded land to Ohio (in particular, the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District) subject to the criteria that the land had to be used for flood control, conservation, and recreation.  Lately, Ohio began allowing fracking under the land.

“Environmentalists” objected and sued to try to force the land back into Federal hands.  The relevant Federal district court dismissed the suit, and it wound up in the Sixth Circuit.  The Sixth waived the BS Flag at the suit.  Although much of the Court’s ruling was based on a technicality (the suit was brought as a violation of the False Claims Act perpetrated by Ohio for allowing the fracking; the Court demurred), there is another reason to applaud the outcome.

In ruling that there was no violation of the FCA, the Court also said in part,

neither the relators’ [the “environmentalists”] complaint nor their proposed amended complaint includes facts that show how MWCD would have known that the fracking leases violated the deed restrictions or how MWCD “act[ed] in deliberate ignorance” or in “reckless disregard” of that fact.

Indeed, fracking occurs well underground and so well away from any activities related to flood control, conservation, and recreation, which are surface or near-surface activities.  Thus, since fracking does not interfere with or otherwise impact such activities, it cannot violate deed restrictions that involve strictly those activities.

This was just a naked attempt by these relators to prevent us from getting cheap energy out of the deep earth cheaply.

The Sixth Circuit’s ruling can be seen here.

 

h/t Institute for Justice

Foreign Investment Risk

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The People’s Republic of China seems about to illustrate one form of this risk.

The State Council, China’s cabinet, will soon announce new measures that subject many overseas deals to reviews of “strict control,” according to people with direct knowledge of the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Targeted for particular scrutiny by the pending measure are “extra-large” foreign acquisitions valued at $10 billion or more per deal, property investments by state-owned firms above $1 billion, and investments of $1 billion or more by any Chinese company in an overseas entity unrelated to the investor’s core business.

This is nothing but an overt attempt to restrict capital flows across the PRC’s borders.  Restricting such flows from one nation to another, no matter the rationale, elevates the risk of foreign investment.  The investor, whichever the nation of his domicile, cannot count on a reliable income flow from his investment or even being able to get his money back from that investment at the expiration of the arrangement.

Separately, it demonstrates an attitude toward law and government that’s been extant in the PRC and its antecedents for thousands of years: “I don’t like what you’re doing—this investment plan of yours—here’s a nice ex post facto law that makes your activity illegal.”